he got it. lying in san francisco bay was the british ship sea wanderer, of liverpool, a vessel of 2,000 tons, old and rather disreputable in appearance, ready to carry such cargo as she could get and make a precarious profit for her owners. soon she would be scrapped. that is, if she did not go to pieces first.
and yet despite the clumsiness of her outline, with all her sail set, she was a beauty, a perfect swan of a ship; a swan with a streaked and dark and dirty breast and body. she had loaded with grain at port costa and now lay anchored in midstream waiting to get a crew. the skipper, a welshman of cardiff, had a charter to fulfil and was rapidly growing frantic. he was shipping anything and anybody who offered. he took a sharp look at guy vanton, noted the fact that here was a man no longer young, noted the further fact that this man no longer young was a person of intelligence and education, found out that guy had had no sea experience, cursed a little, computed wages, remembered[251] that guy would be so many added pounds of beef on a rope and took him.
the passage was from san francisco to leith in scotland. in the course of it guy put on fifteen pounds and came to a clear understanding with himself and at least one man of the crew.
they fought, he and this other man, in the waist, surrounded by a ring of seamen whose sympathy was entirely against guy and with the scotchman, named macpherson. macpherson was about ten pounds heavier than guy but made the mistake of clinching. whereupon guy turned the fight into a wrestling match and threw his opponent. macpherson’s head striking on an iron butt, there was no more battle in him that day. nor did he challenge guy in the rest of the passage.
guy’s understanding with himself was as forcible and as fortuitous. it was gained, as such comprehensions are, in loneliness and in struggle. he got some of it on the ship’s yards, striving with half-frozen fingers to clutch the wet and stiffened sail. he got some more of it as he lay at night in the tropics on the hatch, looking up at a star-sprinkled and gently rocking sky. he got most of it in the spectacle of his fellows, a race of men dedicated to the achievement of a common purpose for no real or visible reward. certainly they did not sail the seas for the sake of the few dollars it put in their pockets. they could live more comfortably[252] ashore in the easeful jails for vagrants—“with running water and everything,” as one of them put it. they were where they were for the sake of doing something together. they would sail that ship from port to port. they would sail her along a trackless path across the eternal frontier of the ocean in a voyage without precedent. every ship, it came home to guy vanton, is a santa maria; every sailor a columbus. if they failed, they failed gallantly; if they succeeded, they succeeded in an enterprise bigger than themselves.
and they did succeed. at night, under the glare of the arc-lights, alongside a stone quay at leith they stood, a patient little group up forward, and heard the mate, standing on the fo’c’s’le head, address them with the immemorial benediction of the sea, four words:
“that’ll do ye, men.”
a straggling cheer went up and they turned to the shore.
